TiresiasBC

The Good: Elegant deck-building mechanics that allow lots of permutations from a mere five cards.  Without technology cards, there’s practically no learning curve.

The Bad: There are a lot of technology cards to keep track of.  And if you play with technology included and ignore research, you’re likely to lose.

Verdict: A fast-paced mix of Dominion and a simpler Race for the Galaxy, this will delight fans of both games and please fans of either.

I just played the board game “Eminent Domain” last night. It’s like a fast-paced fusion of Race for the Galaxy and Dominion, with the added element of purchaseable technology cards that change game mechanics. It took us substantially longer than the 45 minutes it said on the box - an hour and a half, more like - for our first game, but a lot of that was trying to figure out the strategies that were appropriate and not knowing what all the technology cards did. Also, we have a player who is very much the hemming and hawing kind. I love him, but it’s the truth.

It combines the action-card approach of Dominion with the “role-choosing” element of Race for the Galaxy, using the same five cards to represent both actions and roles. The design is very clever.

The production quality is nice, as well - homeworlds have tiles instead of cards, for example, and there are differently-sized space fighter miniatures representing military power. It comes with its own small plastic bags and a small box to store all the moving pieces in, and so on.  Very self-contained.

If you like Race for the Galaxy and/or Dominion, I highly recommend it. 

Dominion and Race for the Galaxy’s love child is fast-paced and layers enough complication on top of very simple mechanics to create a game that, at first blush, appears to outperform both its parents.

Verdict: Two thumbs up, pending actual play.

Details:

Eminent Domain combines the role-choosing mechanic of Race for the Galaxy with the deck-building element of Dominion.  It also keeps Race’s tableau concept, allowing players to accumulate planets and resources on the table in addition to the decks they build, though much fewer cards stay in play all the time.

The cards you draw from the center, a la Dominion, have multiple purposes.  You can use them for an action written on the card, if you choose.  You also must use them to play a role, like Warfare, Research, Surveying, and so on, and you get a bonus as the Leader.  Then each player in sequence may either Follow your role, getting lesser bonuses but amping up the power of their actions by boosting them with cards or worlds with the same icon.  If you Dissent, you instead draw a card.

Unlike Dominion, you may keep cards in your hand from turn to turn, you just have to make sure your hand is at the limit when your turn ends.

The game’s true innovation comes from the Technology cards.  Using Research cards and resources you’ve produced on your worlds, you may add Technology cards to your deck.  Each is unique, is intended to be played as an action, and increases your power considerably.  However, the highest tier of technology cards are very expensive.  The opportunity cost in lost chances for expansion is potentially high.  I’ll have to see how that works out in actual play.

There are more mechanics, like accumulating fighter tokens using Warfare cards in order to conquer planets, but they’re pretty straightforward.

A key thing to remember is that when you choose a role, you choose it by drawing a card from the piles in the middle.  That means that the more you choose a role, the better you become at it.  You can Boost actions with other cards with the same icon, as mentioned; this means you can play multiple Warfare cards to stack up the bonuses.

Trying it out tonight!  We’ll see how it goes.

I will forever associate this song with the awesomeness of the final scenes and decisions of Bioware’s epic Mass Effect.  In a way, it’s a shame that Mass Effect 2 was such an exponential improvement over the original.  The sequel still looks great, with a cover mechanic as awesome and intuitive as Gears of War’s.  The original, not so much.  Yet the original has a broader scope and introduces the conflict that drives the series.

(And lacks a Southpaw option, ie. has no option to switch movement to the right joystick and aiming to the left, but I digress.)

It also has a far more kickass ending song than 2, which simply plays a soundtrack.  I think.  I can’t even remember, which says it all.

———

If a game or movie ends well, there’s a unique opportunity to encapsulate the emotions of that moment within a song.  It lets you revisit that feeling of watching the movie for the first time in a way that’s otherwise impossible.  The Jason Bourne movies played this to the hilt, always ending on a strong note and immediately cutting to Moby’s “Extreme Ways.”  How perfectly did this capture the feel of movies about an assassin who lost his memories?  ”I had to close down everything; I had to close down my mind…”  That song is still my ringtone.

In Mass Effect, your final decisions are exhilarating.  The whole game builds up to those moments, and lets you make the sacrifice or vent your frustration as you see fit.  As you walk off, the music starts.  Would I even like this song if it weren’t for Mass Effect?  I have no idea.  It has the emotional payload of a game I spent an embarrassing number of hours completing in detail.

I would say more, but Mass Effect is the kind of game that I don’t want to spoil, even four years after its release.  You should play it.

In one sentence: It’s two-thirds brainstorming, one-third roleplaying, and 100% improvisional history jazz.

The Good: The game is ridiculously easy to learn and play.  Also the mechanics do make history full of unexpected twists.

The Bad: If you aren’t interested in roleplaying that actually involves playing a role, this game is not for you.

It didn’t go as well as I expected, but I still think people interested in world-building and limited roleplaying would enjoy it.  This was a player issue; one of the players was strongly averse to roleplaying any Scenes.  We did a few anyway.  Take away any of the roleplaying element, and it becomes primarily a fun brainstorming and creative-writing game.

Taking away the roleplaying also robs the game of at least one third of its depth, as the Periods and Events are far more general.  The game’s potential to create vivid history relies on Scenes, because they make explicit the true motives and extra characters.  Without it, you lose the vividness, and you just have history.

I happen to like history, but it definitely becomes more a thought exercise than a game if you take away the game part.

I hope to try again with different players who’ve run other tabletop games and have more interest in establishing and roleplaying characters at the Scene level.

UPDATE: Played again with different players, and it was amazing.  Confirmed first impression, and intensely-played scenes are fantastic.

I can’t think of a better $10 I’ve spent.

First off, Microscope is not complex.  It seems like it should be, but it’s not.  It doesn’t even need a GM.

You start with a general concept of your history, no more than a sentence.  You move on to discussing what elements you want to see and don’t want to see - each person can add or ban a few elements.  Then you decide where history starts and where the history ends.  That’s all the group discussion that’s necessary.  Each person then adds one Period or Event.

That’s where the fun begins.  The game is divided into Periods, Events, and Scenes.  As you’d guess, Periods are the larger eras, Events take place within one epoch, and scenes occur within each Event.  They are each represented by notecards or flashcards you write yourself: Periods are upright, Events are sideways beneath them, and scenes are upright beneath Events.

You choose whether Periods and Events are light or dark, to help everyone get a feel for the moral tone of the events. (E.g. If the rebel victory is light, then the government must have been bad!)

Each player in turn is the Lens, responsible for deciding what the focus of this round of history-making is.  It could be something general or very specific, but there must be room for people to make historic events around and about it.

When each player expounds a Period or Event, what they say goes.  The bedrock rule of the game is that you cannot contradict what’s been done.  If someone else makes an amazing city, you can nuke that city!  Once it’s in play, it belongs to no one, and the great thing is that nuking the city doesn’t stop them from going and embellishing the past of the city.  This is a nonlinear game, and a game where you determine outcomes.  It’s not enough to say “terrorists attack.”  You’d have to say which terrorists attack where and whether they succeed or fail.  We may not know the nitty-gritty details - but someone else can flesh them out with Scenes.

Scenes answer questions.  You pose the question, like “why did the terrorist attack the country where he was born and raised?”  You establish the scene - a meeting of his terrorist cell, for instance, deciding whether the mission is a go or no-go.  You choose a few characters who are required.  Then you go around the group in order choosing or creating the characters you play.  You roleplay it out until the answer becomes clear.  You roleplay thoughts, perceptions about the world (which become facts!), and actions.  Often the question will hinge on the decision of a single player, but the Scene gives that decision context and meaning.  Once the question is answered, the Scene ends.

In Scenes, if players disagree on something that exists in the world outside the character, there’s a mechanic to decide whose vision goes.  It’s called a Push.  It is, in essence, a pause in the game while the alternative is proposed, any other alternatives are solicited, and people vote by pointing their fingers at the people whose ideas they like.  It’s a way of showing how strongly you support any given idea.  You then count up fingers as votes, not people.  This idea is a great solution to the common nerd-tension problem of simple up-down votes.

In time, you have an expanse of Periods running in order across the table, with Events beneath them and Scenes still further beneath them.  What if a scene ended and you wanted to still explore those characters?  Ask another question!  Create another scene on your turn!  But bear in mind you won’t all be playing the same character you were last time.  In the meantime, history takes strange turns.

People don’t make or solicit suggestions in this game.  When you’re in the hotseat, it’s your time to create.  It doesn’t have to be complicated.  Like anything improvisional, people riff off each other.  They may take your seemingly-dull suggestion and attach something genius to it.  This is the other side of having absolute authorial control on your turn.

What makes such a free-flowing game work is the organized turn structure and that the ending is defined.  That allows events to be nonlinear.  It lets everyone be comfortable when the unexpected happens, because survival isn’t at stake.  You know where history ends.  As a group, you decided it up front!

I have no grasp of how long it would take because there are no victory-or-defeat conditions.  There is the advantage that by simply putting the cards in order and maintaining their vertical or horizontal orientations, you can save your history and work on it more later!  You could end after any number of turns.

I think I may try to give it a go this weekend, if I can get people on board.  It might be a hard sell, especially so soon after I convinced them to try Burning Wheel, but I would like to play it before I have to move home… if I do have to move home.

Rating: Two thumbs up.